
Bryant Among His Countrymen 



THE POET, THE PATRIOT, THE MAN 



AN ORATION 



BEFORE THE GOETHE CLUB 



SAMUEL OSGOOD, D.D. LL.D 




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BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN 



THE POET, THE PATRIOT, THE MAN 



AN ORATION 



BEFORE THE GOETHE CLUB 



Wednesday Evening, October 30T11, 1878 



BY 

SAMUEL OSGOOD, D.D., LL.D. 



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NEW YORK 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

lS2 FIFTH AVENUE 
1S79 



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BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN ; 

THE POET, THE PATRIOT, THE MAN. 
AN ORATION 

BEFORE THE GOETHE CLUB, 
WEDNESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 30, 1878, 

By SAMUEL OSGOOD, D.D., LL.D. 

OUR loved and venerated friend, the illustrious poet, 
the patriarch of our American literature, went from 
us in June, the month in which he had wished to die in 
God's own time. Our whole people mourned. All who 
could enter crowded the church and joined tenderly and 
reverently in the fitting solemnities there. A few friends 
with the family followed the body to Roslyn and commit- 
ted it to the ground among the trees and flowers, that had 
learned hymns from him. The leaves are falling there, the 
flowers are fading and dying in that forest cemetery. That 
is their nature and they have kept their sacred watch at the 
grave as long as they could. We are not to try to change 
that nature or to force the bloom of earth to put on the 
immortality of Paradise. We are concerned now with 
other growths of art and letters that do not die, and we do 
not meet now at the grave. Death is not here, but life. 
This is not a funereal, but rather a festal hour, not a mor- 
tuary, but a natal occasion, so near to the poet's birthday 
and so fittingly celebrated as the new birth of his fame, 
now that his country accepts him anew among her immortal 
sons, who have said their good word and done their great 



4 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A TION. 

work and gone to their rest. His spirit is with God, with 
whom are the souls of the faithful, and so in a serious and 
a sacred sense it is with us, in our fellowship with that 
communion of letters and humanity which belongs to the 
kingdom of God. 

This Goethe Club, which is given to the higher literature 
under the greatest name in German poetry and which has 
received our venerable poet with its highest honors, justly 
calls you now to unite with them in this welcome of Bryant 
to his lasting place in his country and mankind. 

In treating, as I am to try to do, of his hold upon his coun- 
trymen, I would do it in the most generous and comprehen- 
sive sense and look upon all who live with us as our people, 
and all of every land who love good letters and fine art as of 
our kindred. This was his feeling always, student, traveller, 
citizen of the world as he was, and we seem almost to see 
him among us with his white head and benign face and 
persuasive lips as when you so cordially received him ; and 
he seems now to approve every hearty word for fraternity 
among men and peace between nations. American he was 
and yet none the less cosmopolitan. In fact, because truly 
American, he can more fully take and give our fellowship 
with all races. Here to-night Bryant receives honors from 
the countrymen of Goethe and the countrymen of Bryant 
rejoice in the homage and return it. 

I. Bryant was first to take hold of his countrymen by tak- 
ing hold of the country itself and by presenting our land, its 
scenery and growths in the charmed light of poetry. He 
first entered this America by the Gate Beautiful, and left it 
open to all who came after him. It is of course unwise to 
say that there was no poetic sentiment here before him, 
no earnest love of nature, for these belong to the civilized 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 5 

human mind, and especially to the English or Anglo-Ger- 
man race which has lived here for two centuries and a half. 
There were lovers of scenery and makers of verse here 
from the beginning of our colonies, but it is quite remarka- 
ble that no classic poet appeared until he came, and that 
a Green Mountain Boy at eighteen years began American 
poetry with immortal verse. 

The Pilgrims of the May Flower in 1620 might have 
brought with them hither the master-pieces of Spenser and 
Shakspeare from the mother country, and the Puritans of 
the Arabella in 1630 were under the lead of graduates of 
Old Cambridge, and some of them fellow-students there 
with Milton himself. When the Bryants came in an after- 
voyage of the May Flower, to the Old Colony about the 
year 1640, a year which Germans may well remember as 
the date of the accession of that Great Elector, Frederick 
William of Prussia, who started what we call Modern Ger- 
many, they left Milton in England at the age of thirty- 
two, author of "Comus," " Lycidas," "II Penseroso " and 
" L'Allegro," just returning to London from the country to 
begin his political career, as our Bryant began his in New 
York, at about the same age, nearly two centuries afterward. 
Does it not seem as if the Bryant forefather, Stephen, must 
have brought with him some spark of that Milton's fire, and 
that it was kept smouldering on the family hearth, until it 
kindled into flame, when " Thanatopsis " sprang to life. 

If we ask why so gifted a people as the New England 
race could live nearly two hundred years in this new 
and beautiful country without originating any enduring 
poetry, we may specify some reasons that lighten if they 
do not quite explain the difficulty. In the first place, 
it must be remembered that for a long time these people 



b DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

had to struggle for very life, and that moreover when they 
conquered peace, and won comfort, they were bent on 
building up and extending civil order, reclaiming the wil- 
derness, or planting their great domain with farms and 
homesteads and giving what in their eyes was beauty to 
the stern reality of life, instead of revelling in visions of 
the ideal. Again if they wanted poetry, they could import 
it from England in plenty and a much better article than 
any that their pedantic versifiers were likely to produce, 
and they could import it also in better shape and at lower 
prices than those of the domestic product. 

But perhaps the dearth of native poetry in America may 
be quite as much explained by the fact that the dominant 
Puritan belief was unfriendly to such literature by its pecu- 
liar interpretation of the Bible as the only revelation from 
God and its contempt for nature and mankind as both 
fallen from God and incapable of giving light to the soul ; 
whilst the dominant liberals who rejected this stern creed 
went for a time far wrong the other way and under the 
teachings of Locke and his school and of the French Ma- 
terialists who came after him, they denied or ignored the 
intuitive and ideal faculties of man and were blind to the 
Spirit of God in nature and the world. 

Yet the soul of poetry was in the race, and it was only a 
question of time, when it should speak out. There was 
evidently a kind of uniformity, a sameness in the thought 
and life of New England, that was not favorable to poetry 
and the new spirit could come only with some protest or 
antagonism. Sameness is death, and a certain difference 
always goes with vitality, whether in the bursting of a bud 
into flower, or the opening of an age into its ideas and arts. 
When poetry came, a new culture challenged the old the- 



BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN. J 

ocracy, and as Greece broke away from the Oriental rule of 
priest and king, so the rising literature here came out from 
the old Puritan theocracy, and claimed to hear God's Spirit 
in the woods and the waters as well as in the Bible and the 
pulpit. We cannot but note this tendency in Bryant's 
earliest poems. He was never a radical in the distinctive y 
sense of this word either in religion or politics, yet he 
began with a virtual protest against the old absolutism of 
the dogma and priesthood ; and he appeals to nature and to 
mankind as witnesses to God. His first characteristic poem, 
" Thanatopsis," is reverent, religious, not unchristian, yet it 
makes no reference to church, preacher or Scripture, and in 
its affirmation of the universality of death, it rebukes the 
reigning assumption that death, in its material sense, was an 
afterthought of the Creator, and came with an act of trans- 
gression in Eden a few thousand years ago. He meditates 
upon death as a fact of nature to be met tranquilly by man, 
not as an accident that might have been shunned, or as a 
curse that should not have been. He keeps in this poem, 
as always, his piety. He is the Puritan still, who begins 
and ends all things with God, although he does not name 
Him. Yet he is a Puritan Greek as he always was, and 
with his sense of God over all he united a steadfast convic- 
tion of God's presence in nature and man and of the worth 
of this visible world. 

In some respects Bryant's love of nature was peculiar, 
and it differed much from that of other poets who are often 
named with him, especially Cowper and Wordsworth, who 
were in some points his masters. Nature was Bryant's first 
love, and he wooed her before he saw the world, whilst 
Cowper and Wordsworth had tried the world and had their 
fill of it before they took to the woods and waters ; Cowper 



8 DR. OSGOOD'S ORA TION. 

having for a while lost his wits under its coaxing agitations, 
and Wordsworth having escaped with his head from the 
revolutionary mob of Paris and the threat of the guillotine. 
If it is said, as it surely may be, that Bryant had none of 
the excitements and temptations that met those gifted 
men, and that with him the choice was between nature as a 
school of poetry and no school at all, we must allow a cer- 
tain truth to the statement. Yet how honorable is this 
serious truth ! With no masterpieces of art around him, 
no old halls and temples, no pictures and sculpture, with 
little color in costume or in house decoration, with few 
books, little if any good music, little artistic society, instead 
of Oxford or Cambridge and their favored fellowships for 
life, with only two years of study in William's College, 
which was only one year older than he was, when he entered 
it at the age of sixteen, in 1810 ; with all these limitations, 
Bryant, when about eighteen years of age, wrote a poem of 
nature which the English language cannot spare, any more 
than it can spare the masterpieces of Cowper and Words- 
worth. 

He loved nature none the less because he loved her first, 
and he had her love in return, and a certain elemental 
power came to him from her and went into his verse. Of 
course he carried his own life, his own thought and feeling 
to nature, but he did not carry the passions of the world 
and the agitations of a stormy career to her, that she might 
comfort him for the loss of other loves or help him fight 
the old battles, and tell the old stories, and paint the old 
pictures over again. Herein he differs widely from Byron 
who came out as a poet at about the same time, and whose 
" Childe Harold " runs parallel in date with Bryant's early 
poems. " Childe Harold," if not the most remarkable, is cer- 



BRYANT AMONG HIS COUNTRYMEN. 9 

tainly the most celebrated English poem of the Nineteenth 
Century, and it has made the most mark upon men ; yet we 
Americans do not shrink from naming our poet's early 
pieces in their calm wisdom and reverent beauty in the 
same breath with that impassioned and marvellous Ro- 
maunt. Bryant had not Spain, Switzerland, Greece and 
Italy to roam over and to put into song ; but the mountain 
boy looked as deeply into nature as the petted English 
Lord, and he did not make the mistake of transferring to 
her face the blood-shot gleam of his own eyes and of con- 
founding his passions with her moods. 

Bryant had not seen Santa Croce or written like Byron : — 

" In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie 
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is 
Even in itself an immortality." 

There were no stately tombs or temples around his village 
home or within his range of village burying grounds, but 
he saw death in its majesty, and what a sepulchre he dis- 
covered : — 

" The hills 
Rock ribbed and ancient as the sun, the vales 
Stretching in pensive quietness between ; 
The venerable woods — rivers that move 
In majesty and the complaining brooks 
That make the meadow green ; and poured round all 
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste — 
Are but the solemn decorations all 
Of the great tomb of man." 

He had not St. Peter's Church before him — 

" Christ's mighty shrine before his martyr's tomb." 

Nor could he say of it with Byron : — 

" But thou of temples old and altars new, 
Standest alone with nothing like to thee — 
Worthiest of God, the holy and the true. 

Majesty, 
Power, Glory, Strength and Beauty all are aisled 
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled." 



10 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A TION. 

So wrote Childe Harold, but we Americans can say our 
prayers as well at the call of our Childe William in his 
" Forest Hymn," and he found a place of worship grander 
far:— 

" The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned 
To hew the shaft and lay the architrave 
And spread the roof above them — ere he framed 
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back 
The sounds of anthems ; in the darkling wood 
Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down 
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks 
And supplication. 

Be it ours to meditate 
In these calm shades thy milder majesty 
And to the beautiful order of thy works 
Learn to conform the order of our lives." 

So the comparison might run on not wholly to the disad- 
vantage of our bard whose faith like his own " Waterfowl '■' is 
divinely guided, whilst poor Harold strays tempest-tossed. 
Truly, Bryant wrote in that early time, and it was always 
true of him : 

"He who from zone to zone 
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight 
In the long way that I must tread alone 

Will lead my steps aright." 

The forty poems which expressed Bryant's genius and 
experience before he came to New York in 1825 show what 
rich lessons he learned in his studies and rambles in that 
hill country of Western Massachusetts, and these speci- 
mens prove their dominant tone. He was certainly a poet 
because God made him so, and he did his best probably 
before he knew what he was doing. Perhaps it is wisest to 
leave there the definition of poetry, and to say simply that 
it comes from poets as apples come from apple-trees. We 
may define the two things, the poetry and the apples, but 
we must have them before we define them and the things are 
better than the definitions. All the familiar definitions of 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 1 

poetry have a certain truth, but none has the whole truth. 
It is, as is often said, the ideal in literature, but not the 
ideal only or always ; for much strong and kindling poetry 
deals with the most positive and sensuous reality, and this 
is the present turn of the muse. Nor does poetry always 
put beautiful thought into beautiful words, for much thrill- 
ing verse presents frightful images in terrible words, and 
tragedy goes as far as it can with terror without parting 
company with pity, which subdues fear and so purifies emo- 
tion. Aristotle, with his marvellous good sense, comes very 
near the mark when he distinguishes poetry from history by 
its dealing with things as they may be, instead of as they 
are, and by its treating of the whole instead of the parts. 
For certainly the poet is looking to what may be, and he 
is always trying to make the least word or sentence tell the 
whole of the matter. But without spending time in com- 
bining and condensing definitions, we may safely say, that 
poetry comes from a certain fulness of spirit that over- 
flows in new forms, and that the poet is he who is moved 
to make things new from what is in him and the world. 
The poet is he who sees and seizes the life of things and 
puts it into pictured and musical words. This life like all 
fulness of life tends to rhythm, and the muse dances more 
or less gaily or solemnly as all overflowing life dances. 
There was this overflow in young Bryant, and if there was 
not as much voluptuous sweetness or high-wrought music 
in his strain as in other gifted bards, and if he tended more 
to solemn rhythm, than to luxurious melody, it was because 
/ his temper was serious ; and moreover because his teacher 
in verse was nature, more than schools, and nature tends 
to rhythm more than to melody, and her rivers and forests 
and winds and oceans sing a very plain chant, and the 



12 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

birds themselves do not go far into the airs of Mozart 
and Mendelsohn. 

As to the material of Bryant's early and characteristic 
poetry, it evidently deals more with nature than with 
human life. It is landscape-painting with few figures 
introduced, yet always with tender feeling for men, per- 
haps more feeling for them than with them. The speech- 
less babe and the gray headed man, the matron and the 
maid appear to him as he meditates upon the dying ages ; 
and in his "Winter Piece" the herbless field and the spoiled 
shades were still sought and precious : — 

" I loved them still ; for they seemed 
Like old companions in adversity." 

He was more at home with landscape and nature than with 
persons, and it is quite memorable that even in his thought- 
ful and elaborate poem of "The Ages," delivered at Cam- 
bridge in 1 82 1, in which History is his theme, he gives 
about as many lines to his description of Boston Harbor, 
with its islands, as to the sketch of Greece and Rome, with 
their heroes and sages. Yet persons gain more and more 
ground upon his canvas, and he cannot look upon the cold 
and solemn North Star without feeling for the sailor, half- 
wrecked, his compass lost, and for the lost travellers in 
perilous wastes, who find safety in that light. 

As to the ideas that run through these early poems, we 
may say what we have already hinted, that they are of the 
Hebrew-Greek type ; that is they start from the existence 
of God over all nature and life, and they recognize the 
presence of His spirit in all creation, thus combining in a 
certain way faith in the Transcendent and in the Immanent 
God. Yet he is rather with Cowper than with Wordsworth 
in his limited sense of the full immanence of the divine life 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 3 

in nature ; and he looks more with the eye of the Hebrew 
than that of the Greek, or may we not say more with the 
eye of Isaiah than that of a modern German like Goethe 
on the universe. He philosophizes upon the universe more 
with Newton than Spinoza, and to him God is more First 
Cause than Eternal Substance. Herein he is all the more 
American, for we start in our thinking from the God of 
our fathers, and we shrink from whatever looks like the 
pantheist vision of nature as the Supreme. Yet the poet 
keeps his faith firm in God in all as well as over all, and he 
is Greek as well as Hebrew in this. In his " Ages" he 
speaks of the Greek illumination thus: — 

" And the pure ray, that from thy bosom came, 

Far over many a land and age has shone 

And mingles with the light that beams from God's own throne." 

To him too nature unmistakably reveals the mind of 
God, and he accepts the ancient faith that the Polar Star 
instead of relentless force presents in its beams — 

" A beauteous type of that unchanging good, 
That bright eternal beacon by whose ray 
The voyager of time should shape his heedful way." 

Such in their leading traits were Bryant's early poems, 
and by them he took hold of his countrymen by taking first 
hold of the country, winning the people with the land 
which his muse conquered. I can only add briefly under 
this head, that in thus taking the landscape, he took hold 
of the people also by two leading ideas, which are essen- 
tially American — first the idea of firm citizenship under 
civil justice, and secondly the idea of fair play to the 
human mind by full freedom to bring out its powers. The 
young poet from boyhood was a sturdy patriot, and flamed 
up in verse on Independence days ; and in vindicating his 
own right to be a poet, he vindicated the right of all true 



14 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

culture in a day when narrowness pinched the schools as 
well as the churches. Those who can look back as far as 
1825, the year when Bryant came to New York, can re- 
member those early poems in our school books, and what 
an impression we who were at school then had of the poet 
and of the man. In the name of the school boys of that 
day, of whom I was one, and of the school girls who will 
allow me to speak for them, I express our filial reverence 
for the poet of our childhood and our youth, whose verses 
became a part of our very being, and beat with our hearts, 
and moved in our step in their grace and power. This is 
not the trick of rhetoric, but the offering of earnest grati- 
tude. How many thoughtful men and women, who read 
his verses when they were at school, can rise up and call 
William Cullen Bryant blessed for what he has been and 
done for them and their children. His name is blessed 
here to-night. 

II. But now a great change came to him, and with it no 
small trial of his spirit and purpose. Why he left his 
country home and law office in Great Barrington for the 
more stirring life and opportunity of a great city, we can 
readily see; but we do not so readily understand why he 
came here to New York instead of going to Boston where 
he had been so honored, and where his Puritan temper was 
more at home. Nearness and the easy drift of rivers be- 
tween New York and Western Massachusetts, and the 
wishes of cordial friends who lived there and here, had 
much to do with his choice undoubtedly ; yet there was a 
destiny in it that drew him to the great center of com- 
merce, enterprise, and ultimately of arts and letters. When 
he came here, however, this city had little of its present 
standing, and Boston and Philadelphia disputed its pros- 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 5 

pective superiority even in population and trade. It was 
then comparatively a provincial city, great indeed, hoping 
soon to complete its second hundred thousand of inhabi- 
tants under the spur of the Erie Canal, which then opened 
into this harbor for the first time the waters and the wealth 
of the great lakes. Great and tingling was the promise of 
growth and power, but not greater than was accomplished 
in twenty-five years. If the Erie Canal made this city 
metropolitan in 1825, the ocean steamers, California gold, 
the railroads and the electric telegraph made her cosmo- 
politan about a quarter of a century afterwards ; and our 
rural poet came to live and work and be author, editor and 
citizen in all this turmoil and chase. What will become 
of him, the ready question is? What did become of him, 
we who have known him here in his career for fifty years, 
more or less, can say with considerable unanimity. 

It is well to consider how he was received here as a man 
of letters, this Puritan bard upon this Knickerbocker ground, 
and among a people whose choice society was little Puri- 
tanic, and to a considerable extent quite churchly and 
Anglican. He might have found apparently more con- 
genial society in Boston, and it is not easy to say how his 
genius would have shaped itself with those cultivated and 
gifted men, Ticknor and Longfellow and Lowell, under the 
elms of Harvard, and whether this village Milton might not 
have added his mature epic poem, his Paradise Lost, to his 
early miscellaneous pieces. But he did not go to Boston 
or Cambridge, and he did come here ; and he found work 
and home and friends and fame in some respects new. 
The time was in certain respects favorable here for author- 
ship, and here, as also in Boston, there was a memorable 
awakening in literature, although this city had the start in 



1 6 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

classic letters of the English school, and even in history, 
Irving was in advance of Prescott and Bancroft, and the 
noble Boston historical school. Bryant dates the new 
literary movement from 1821, when Cooper first won fame 
by his " Spy," when Irving's " Sketch Book " was completed, 
when Miss Sedgwick began her charming series of domestic 
novels, and Percival and Halleck published their poems. 
Boston was not far behind, and perhaps in certain scholastic 
studies in advance of New York ; and Dana's " Idle Man" 
was completed, and " Bryant's Ages," and a few other 
poems came out that same year in the Pilgrim City. 

Yet it must be remembered that the literary atmosphere 
of Boston was then in some respects more heavy and schol- 
astic than that of New York, and less favorable to the 
genial English taste that prevailed in the best circle here. 
Dana's love for Shakespeare and Coleridge and Words- 
worth was not much liked among the old school liberals 
of Boston, who had been brought up upon Locke and 
Pope ; and a very superficial philosophy and criticism shut 
out the leading thinkers and authors of New England then 
from communion with the best mind of England ; whilst a 
certain theological prejudice estranged theologians from the 
great lights of the English and Latin Church until Chan- 
ning broke the spell by his Essays on " Milton and Fenelon" 
(1 826-1 829), and claimed for the best literature of Christen- 
dom a place among the inspirations of God. Had Bryant 
gone to Boston, he might have joined in the renaissance 
there, and he might not only have accepted, as he did the 
Channing movement for humanity, but he might have 
favored the more radical transcendental movement headed 
by Emerson in 1832, which was perhaps more Germanic 
than English or American in its idea and tendency ; al- 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 7 

though he disliked this movement to a certain extent, and 
often he has said to me that the Boston and Cambridge 
men Germanized too much. But he stayed here, and he 
brought his Puritan severity and his Greek culture to bear 
upon the revived old-school literature here ; and he was 
cordially received by its leaders, especially by Cooper and 
the circle of scholars and gentlemen who composed the 
weekly club which Cooper had founded, many of whose 
faces we can recall, such as Chancellor Kent, Wiley the 
bookseller, Henry D. Sedgwick, Morse, Durand, Professor 
H. J. Anderson, Halleck, Verplanck and Charles King. The 
place of the meeting, the old Washington Hotel, near our 
City Park, and on the site of Stewart's great marble store, 
shows how close his quarters were, and how New York has 
grown since those days. The influence of those associates 
must in some respects have been wholesome for a man re- 
served and introspective as Bryant was ; and it did much to 
make him in the best sense a New York man, and some- 
what different from the noted and excellent Boston and 
Cambridge type of character, which was so subjective, 
scholastic, sedentary, and until of late so little muscular 
and artistic, far more fond of books than of nature, and of 
print than pictures and sculpture. He had had enough of 
the East wind, and, grateful for the bracing air, he was 
evidently not sorry now to be nearer the Western breezes ; 
and he was not afraid of a Southern exposure, for he knew 
how to take it without harm. 

Probably his life here did much to give him hold upon 
reality, to warm his poetry with sunshine, to animate it 
with personality and action, and to give it more body than 
before. If Bryant and Emerson are the two great American 
interpreters of nature, and we honor them both as they 



lb DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

honored each other, may we not say that nature is more 
completely interpreted by their difference as well as by 
their likeness, and that Emerson's subjective and intro- 
versial sense is helped out by Bryant's open vision and 
objective reality. They stand together now two sons of 
Massachusetts, two good New Englanders, who in different 
schools have interpreted nature to our time and to the 
ages. The most telling tribute ever paid to the dead poet 
was paid by the survivor fourteen years ago, when both 
met at Bryant's seventieth anniversary and Emerson was 
the guest of honor there. 

As a poet he kept his hold of his countrymen, and he 
strengthened it not by any new and startling bursts of 
genius, but by keeping the old ground and growing from 
the old root. His poetry widened its range, ripened its 
beauty and sweetened its humanity and exalted its faith ; 
but it did not change its essential type of calm medita- 
tion and descriptive art. New subjects came into his field 
of vision in his new home, whilst he kept open his old base 
of supplies of rural images from the fields and woods and 
rivers and hills of his early days. His verse feels the power 
of the near ocean and speaks as neighbor to the Western 
prairie ; it stirs with the rush of the waters of the noble 
Hudson, and is not unmindful of the rush of human life in 
the currents of noble Broadway. He catches the pulse- 
beat of the great nations here, and answers to it in trans- 
lations of choice gems of the French, Spanish, German and 
Portuguese muse and in original odes to the genius of Dante 
and Schiller. He does not forget Nature, and his exqui- 
site studies of the flowers and the seasons, the clouds and 
stars and winds and woods, the seas and mountains, grow 
into such completeness that a Bryant Year of Nature might 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 1 9 

rival in beauty and favor Keble's " Christian Year." Yet life, 
in its struggle and pressure, came in for its share of his 
thought, and his later poems deepen in pathos for human 
grief and sometimes ring with enthusiasm for patriotism 
and humanity. Religion becomes a more positive convic- 
tion and emotion, and what is sometimes said of Marcus 
Aurelius Antoninus, the last of the great Stoics, may be 
said with added meaning of him. It was said of Marcus 
Aurelius that he brought Stoicism so near to Christianity 
that after him it died out and Christianity took its place. 
In Bryant the change was made before death, and his poems 
are the record that in his life he passed from the Stoic into 
the Christian, and so embodied the lessons of ages in his 
experience. 

Yet his poetry kept its essential intellectual type and did 
not glow with passion or burn with martial fire. He had 
neither epic fulness nor dramatic compass and force. This 
is but saying that he belonged to his own time and people 
and school and temperament ; for the New England that 
schooled him was essentially intellectual and meditative in 
its literature, and even in theology it reasoned out Heaven 
and Hell by calm logic, and left passion and force to other 
and more worldly fields. He was in his way scholastic in 
his poetry, a disciple of his own set school ; and with his 
wonderful sense of beauty, he never ventures to lose his 
calmness or in any way to be unwise. He never said a 
foolish thing and rarely, if ever did an unwise one. Even 
love, which makes so many men fools, made him thoughtful ; 
and his one sacred love went forth in calm idyls and rose 
into godly hymns, and never burned with wasting fires. 
Yet this we may and must say in truth of the calmness of 
his verse and of a certain want of the will element in his 



20 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

muse, that his active life made up for that want. His life 
was epic and drama too, true to the supreme justice that 
follows the Epos of Providence, and brave for the sovereign 
right that works out and fights out the Ethos of mankind. 
We must look to him as to the patriot and the man in 
order to appreciate the worth of the ideal expression and 
force that he gave, and to show that poetry is not word 
only but action also. 

His poetry was little personal, and shy of men and women 
he was more at home, especially in early life, with nature. 
Herein he differs signally from Goethe who always delighted 
in persons, and who put his whole poetic and ideal experi- 
ence into such personal forms as Werther, Faust and Wil- 
helm Meister. " Faust," Goethe's masterpiece, and the great 
poem of modern times since " Hamlet," is not only Goethe 
himself, but the modern man as Thinker under trial from 
Passion, Doubt and Care and as Conqueror by the Spirit of 
Beauty and the power of Action. Bryant did not put him- 
self and his age into any such ideal embodiment. He saw 
much of the modern man, and lived the modern life, but 
not as Goethe did. He was the new Puritan, the modern 
Independent in face of Death, Tyranny and Superstition. 
Conqueror by the charm of Nature, and by the power of 
Faith and Duty. This Puritan Greek lived out his idea 
grandly, and he did not dramatize it, as Goethe dramatized 
his. Bryant apparently did not have a hard struggle with 
passion as Goethe did, but he knew Doubt and Care and 
conquered them. If he was not compelled to fight hard 
with the flesh, he saw something of the world and the devil. 
How could he help it, all those fifty years here in this 
tumult — and his victory was constant, noble and inspiring. 
If he did not put the poem of his life into verse, he left the 



BR YA NT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2 1 

materials as a legacy to us, and Time is already beginning 
to shape these materials into form and to breathe into them 
a soul. The Puritan Greek is the name of that life-poem. 

Dwell a little now upon Bryant's career among us as a 
patriot, which is very much the same with his course as an 
editor. Editors are not always saints, even in New York, 
where we have the best of them. He was not quite saintly 
in his temper always, yet the wonder was that when there 
was so much to tempt an editor to play the Satan in re- 
venge, he grew in courtesy and lost the gall from his pen 
without losing its point. I do not propose and I am not 
qualified to go into the record of his political career. Not 
a partisan myself, and believing him to have been a sincere 
patriot, I will content myself, and I hope to make you con- 
tent with the simplest statement of his public career, and 
of the work which he did for his country by his pen and 
voice. If my remarks are too general and sweeping to suit 
practical politicians, set it down to my professional habit or 
philosophical infirmity. 

Bryant, as a patriot, belongs to what may be called in the 
largest sense, the second cycle of our national history ; and 
in this cycle he was the foremost citizen, who served and 
ruled the country without official power. From 1775, when 
Washington took command of our army at Cambridge, to 
1825, when John Quincy Adams became President of the 
United States, Virginia had been, in a sense, the dominant 
state in the Union, and her men tended to the chief place. 
All the Presidents with the exception of the single term of 
John Adams, of Massachusetts, who was elected by the 
vote of Maryland, (1797-1801) were Virginians, and in 1825, 
when Bryant came to New York, the power of the Old 
Dominion was broken, the old parties were virtually dead; 



22 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A T/OJV. 

new issues arose under the spur of new local and industrial 
interests, and the new cycle of American politics had be- 
gun. The two states that had always followed close upon 
Virginia and tried to take from her the Presidency, were 
Massachusetts and New York, with South Carolina close 
upon their heels. Massachusetts with the help of New 
York and the West, carried the day in 1825 for Adams, but 
after that New York changed the whole course of things by 
reaching down, not to South Carolina for a Calhoun, or 
Mississippi for a Jefferson Davis, but to the South-west for 
a new man, and the election of Jackson, of Tennessee, in 
1829, with Van Buren as the Vice-President afterwards, was 
started in her counsels. Here Bryant's political career be- 
gan with the new democracy, which has been so much 
dominated by New York ; and his interest in the movement 
was not for the partisanship and greed for spoils which so 
damaged it, but from his interest in the opposition to false 
centralization and his wish to guard against the prostitution 
of the national power to local schemes or class aggrandise- 
ment. The popular party in the first cycle of fifty years, 
changed its name from Republican to Democrat, and in the 
second cycle it changed its name back again from Democrat 
to Republican with his sympathy. He had a great sense of 
individual right, and of the necessity of guarding against 
every infringement of liberty. He, who had so assailed the 
Jefferson democracy in his boyish rhymes, had become 
quite Jeffersonian in his ideas, and looked upon govern- 
ment as chiefly valuable, as it lets people and states alone, 
and as it secures them the freedom to be let alone, and to 
do their best to help themselves. Protective tariffs for 
special branches of business, and financial corporations with 
exclusive privileges he disliked. He went for free states, 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2 3 

and free trade under the National Union ; and when in 
1832, South Carolina undertook to show her teeth and 
threaten nullification, Bryant approved President Jackson 
alike for showing the guns of the frigate Constitution near 
Fort Sumter, and for abating the high tariff that had given 
Carolina much of her provocation. His aim was the free- 
dom of the States, and also the right of the Union; and 
the key to his whole career is in his estimate of the just 
relation between the central and the sectional, the centri- 
petal and centrifugal forces of the nation. The States and 
the Nation, God hath joined them together, let not man 
put them assunder ; this was his political creed. 

He has been essentially right, and he has triumphed. He 
triumphed when the rightful flag of our fathers was put 
back upon repentant Fort Sumter, and he triumphed when 
the army was withdrawn from the insurgent states, and 
local law was left to its own jurisdiction. He will tri- 
umph if ever that madness is renewed and insurgents again 
anywhere assail the fortresses and the flag of our country. 
He triumphs now, that under the scourge of pestilence, 
good will binds North and South together ; and we hope for 
peace and prosperity in the restored republic, with the law 
of the nation unbroken, and its credit untarnished, with the 
honest dollar the money of the honest man. That he made 
no mistakes I will not say, for he was human, and the field 
of politics is not all patriotism or humanity. But he kept 
justice uppermost ; he took no bribes and sought no station ; 
and I call him calmly the first citizen of our country in our 
time. I am certain that his patriotism exalts his poetry, 
and joins him more closely to the great bards, who have 
felt their country in their inspiration, with Dante, father of 
modern letters at their head, who in Bryant's own words : 



24 DR. OSGOOD'S OR A TION. 

" Scattered far as sight can reach 
The seeds of free and living thought 
On the broad field of modern speech." 

Allow me to recall the fact that after he wrote this ode to 
Dante on the sixth centennial of his birth, in 1865, he 
brought me with his own hand, at my request, the root of a 
choice clematis, to be planted as a Dante memorial in some 
country grounds ; and that last June, when he was taken ill, 
it bloomed, and when he died, the flower faded and fell. 

Bryant's patriotism was more memorable, because he was 
not an enthusiast for institutions and organizations, but a. 
lover of independence and self-control ; or to use an em- 
phatic distinction, which is said to divide men into separate 
classes, he was an individualist, not a multitudinist, more 
earnest for the one in his freedom, than for the many in the 
mass. But his individualism made him patriotic by con- 
necting the liberty of persons with the union of states and 
the law of the nation. How he differed from Webster 
in temperament and schooling, and who of us who were 
there can forget their meeting at the Cooper Commemora- 
tion, in 1852, when Webster presided and Bryant was 
orator, — those two men, the burly iron bound Constitution- 
alist and the lithe, slight, wiry Free Soiler and Free 
Trader. Yet God had a use for them both, and he has 
been bringing them and their ideas together. The nation 
is stronger because of that statesman and that poet ; and 
Bryant and Webster live with us to-day in the freedom of 
the States and the union of the nation. Webster's oration 
at Plymouth, in 1820, against the slave trade chimes well 
with Bryant's ode in 1866, on the " Death of Slavery" : 

" A glory clothes the land from sea to sea, 
For the great land and all its coasts are free." 



BR YANT A MONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2 5 

But the man was the inmost fact and the man is upper- 
most in our thought to-day. We knew him well, and he 
did not keep himself aloof from us, and he was willing that 
we should know him. The man was the soul of the poet 
and the patriot, and his life was marvellously consistent, all 
of a piece, his character and his works, " integer vitae sceler- 
isque purus," whole and without stain indeed. His quick 
and gentle eye, his delicate and vigorous senses, and his apt 
and agile hand and foot showed the sensibility and strength 
that marked his career, and enabled his pen to paint his 
page with beauty, and to point it with truth and courage. 
His intellect looked out of his refined and manly face, and 
promised wise insight rather than elaborate analysis. He 
was more of a practical sage than a speculative philosopher ; 
more fond of seeing and showing the form and movement 
of life than of anatomising its vitals. In his affections he 
was kindly and constant ; and if somewhat reserved in so- 
ciety, and not always open like the rose when it has 
bloomed, he was like the water lily that opened always 
anew at the touch of sunshine. He had many friends, and 
kept and served them, and made sacrifices for them. He 
never set himself above the lowliest of his associates, and 
he was as free from arrogance as from servility. In his 
way, indeed, he was a very proud man, the proudest that I 
ever knew. He never sought out the great after the stan- 
dard of this world's gold and rank, and he never turned 
away from the poor and humble. He was never frightened 
by numbers, position and wealth, whilst very sensitive to- 
wards favor. I never knew him to be agitated but once, 
and that was two years ago in this hall, when as he came to 
receive a national tribute, that beautiful vase which was 
given not by any clique or club, but by people of every 



26 DR. OSGOOD'S ORA TION. 

name and station from Boston to San Francisco, the whole 
of the great assembly without a hint or a suggestion rose 
up in reverence, and then the old poet trembled for a 
moment like a child. 

He was a good example of what we call dignity in 
America, the dignity which comes not from flattening every 
body up or down to the same dead level, but from modestly 
being free to be yourself in your own gifts, tastes and sphere, 
and leaving others to be free. Remember him as he went 
up and down Broadway, to and from his daily work in plain 
dress, a man among men, what dignity unasked and undis- 
puted attended him. Germans, your Emperor William has 
dignity in Berlin as he rides through the Unter den Linden 
in his helmet and military cloak. Honor to him in his 
rightful place and brave and truthful manhood, and con- 
found eveiy assassin's hand that strikes at him, the lawful 
chief. But equal majesty went with our citizen William as 
he went down Broadway to his printing office to hold the 
pen of Franklin, and to reach the nation and the world with 
his thought. He too, in his way was a soldier and knew 
how to use his weapon, and could hit the mark in his edi- 
torials ; and if he did not please those dainty critics who 
like to see the target sprinkled with clattering shot, he won 
favor from the adepts who knew when " the bulls'-eye " is 
pierced by the rifle ball. 

If not naturally a very social man, he came to be more ^ 
than almost any other man in sympathy with his neighbors 
and the community by his hold upon great principles and 
interests. He was in his way as well as poet and editor, 
farmer, forester, herdsman, chemist, physiologist, political 
economist, moralist, artist, historian, and somewhat of a 
theologian, and ready to say his word wherever he was duly 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 2J 

called and able to comply. His social life deepened with 
advancing years ; and in his enthusiasm for public interests 
and associations during the last twenty years he seemed to 
have a second youth, more susceptible and sometimes more 
impulsive than his first youth. In fact a new bloom appeared 
to be budding within him, and to make us sometimes think 
that this century plant was waiting for the hundred years 
to bring out its final and full flowering. The last time that 
I met him in society, it was on last May Day at a festive 
reunion of clergymen, where he was the honored guest, and 
he spoke with his accustomed grace and point. Of the 
nearly fifty who were present, most were young men who 
greeted him for the first time, and were cordially received 
by him. The fellowship was generous and not bound by 
sect, and I never saw him so happy as whilst the noblest utter- 
ances of comprehensive religion such as that of the Rev Dr. 
Prentiss on The Divine Fatherhood and Sonship were 
made, and his face was rapturous in its delight. The last 
evening that I spent with him, he dwelt much upon that 
charming occasion, and he was full of the beauty and joy of 
the country where he had been. His conversation was then 
unusually various and significant, ranging from physiology 
to literature and religion ; in his love of nature showing the 
poet, and in his request for an article for his paper on an 
important subject keeping his place in the editor's chair. 
The remark that left most impression upon me was this, 
" why should not a man however old be happy, so long as 
he can enjoy nature and be free from pain." So the facts 
and faculties of his being held together to the last, and 
when he fell under the blazing sun with a plea for liberty 
and national union on his lips in that lovely park which he 
had helped to construct, it seemed as if that landscape all 



28 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

around was presenting and interpreting his poems of nature, 
and giving the scenery for the closing act of that life which 
had been a drama of justice and humanity. 

There was something more and better than coolness and 
slowness in the economy of his life. He lived long and 
well, not because he lived slowly and scantly, but because 
he lived fully and harmoniously. He was careful to receive 
as much aliment as he needed to give out in action and 
thought, and he found the aliment in nature, society and 
religion, in a wise order of variety and constancy in the city, 
by the seaside and among the hills. So in a measure he 
interpreted the celestial Present of his " Flood of 
Years." 

" In whose reign the change 

That waits on growth and action shall proceed 

With everlasting Concord hand in hand." 

III. Thus Bryant deepens the hold upon his countrymen, 
which he first took by his mastering the country itself in 
the spirit of poetry and patriotism. Is this hold to con- 
tinue, or is it to stop in course of time, and be forgotten 
as most men are forgotten ? Our feeling and conviction 
say no. 

His works are to live, and his work is not to die. There 
are undoubtedly to be great changes in literature and taste 
and art as in all things. Poets are seeing more tragedy in 
nature than he saw, and they are telling of more sadness 
and passion in life than he noted. But he looked with 
keen and honest eyes, and said what he saw, and his word 
answered to the fact before him. So the very changes that 
come will add value to his works, because they are true to 
him and to his time ; and they are moreover foundation 
stones upon which the new culture must rest, and which 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 29 

its loftiest spires cannot disown any more than those min- 
ster towers can ignore the walls upon which they stand, y* 
Remember too that though modes may change, man and 
nature remain, and God and Justice never die. His work 
lives after him in the union of beauty and justice, as well 
as liberty and truth, powers sometimes fearfully separated, 
and which God has joined in this his servant's career. 
Sacred Duty in him was wedded to ideal Grace, as when 
of old grave Numa, who ruled the state with steadfast care, 
sought solace in the groves from Egeria, the nymph of 
heaven. 

The man himself is in his works, and he works ever with 
them. His gentleness was mated with strength that marked 
his character, and looked out from his face. He was a very 
mild, unpretending man, and not commanding in stature, 
yet it was hard to resist the impression of his having a 
certain grandeur of form as of spirit, and artists generally 
overdrew his figure and his face. It was not accident, but 
a certain inherent dignity that made them do this. His 
intimate friends revered him, and they who knew him 
well, and saw him often and freely as I, for years — some 
fifteen years his pastor and always his friend — did for some 
thirty years, never presumed to any light familiarity with 
him, and they would not put their hand on his shoulder 
fondly, although any playful and confiding child might do 
so, and not be rebuked. This impression followed him to 
the last. On his death bed, the day before he died, when 
I offered at his bedside the prayer for the dying, which I 
knew that he loved, his head had the look of a Titan ; and 
when it sank in the repose of death, and a few favored 
friends were admitted to the sacred presence, his face in its 
exquisite lines and noble features and silvery radiance was 



30 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

as one of God's own shining ones, and angelic in sweetness 
and spirituality. That face is ours, and it belongs to our 
country. It is everywhere with the faces of Washington 
and Franklin, and no effort or neglect of man can tear it 
out of the treasures of art and the custody of affection. 

Is there not moreover a kind of environment, a sphere of 
influence, a fellowship of powers and persons that goes with 
and keeps him living with us ? How much there is in this 
city to hold him to us, and us to him. The German Goethe 
did much to build up Weimar in his fifty years' residence 
there, and to train Duke Charles Augustus in taste and 
wisdom. Bryant, in a different way, has done no less for 
New York and for the promising and sometimes preverse, 
but not incorrigible, Prince Gotham, who rules the city by 
sovereign ballot, and who, we hope, although sometimes a 
little wild, is not a bad fellow at heart, and has pretty much 
sown his wild oats. Bryant meets us every where : Our 
rural cemeteries in their sacred beauty began public art, 
and they repeat " Thanatopsis" in their lawns and sculp- 
tures. Our lovely parks interpret the " Forest Hymn" in 
it's reverence and joy. 

Our mighty press in its new and growing relations with 
our social and religious life, is maturing the connection 
which he formed between the secular and the sacred rela- 
tions of this community, and mediating, without confound- 
ing them, between the Church and the world. The beau- 
tiful, and also the useful arts, are coming together under 
the lead which he held more by the purity of his taste and 
the largeness of his sympathy than by any new or profound 
theory of art. Our artists are nearer to our best life and 
favor here to-day, because he liked them and went with 
them. Religion felt his influence, and unassuming and 



BR YANT AMONG HIS CO UNTR YMEN. 3 I 

little dogmatic as he was, he rebuked the spirit of sect 
and the pride of caste, so that our church fellowship is 
sweeter, more humane and godly because of his presence, 
his hymns and his example. More and more he loved the 
living Gospel and the living Christ, and the less he cared 
for any of the sects that set themselves up in place of God 
and his Christ. 

He seemed in a remarkable way to carry the years with 
him instead of being carried away by them, and the century 
of years invested him with a certain majesty, and went with 
him as a body guard. The " Flood of Years" did not 
drown, but floated the man and his muse. The great prin- 
ciples and tendencies which the eighteenth century, in its 
impatient individualism, brought to the nineteenth century, 
with its passion for reconciliation and unity, spoke in his 
word and lived in his thought. Franklin and Adam Smith 
led the way in that company, and Goethe and Manzoni, 
Keble and Wordsworth, Peel and Lincoln, Cavour and 
Thiers, Maurice and Channing followed in the great pro- 
cession that ever seemed to attend him in his public ad- 
dresses, and in fact to be around him in his quiet home, 
and to help him in his unpretending conversation. To 
those of us who were his neighbors, it was a great privilege 
to visit him, and when we saw him, we met the whole 
century in his presence. Old Homer too was his com- 
panion, and helped him to hold his Greek culture with his 
New Testament faith. So the ages joined to do him 
honor, and to keep him true. 

If I were asked to sketch a memorial or a monument 
for Bryant's memory, I would not presume to do it, or pre- 
tend to interfere with the proper artist's task. I would, 
however, venture upon a hint to the competent artist. I 



3 2 DR. OSGOOD'S ORATION. 

would say, put something of Delphi and Jerusalem into 
your tribute to this Puritan Greek. Take from the Delphic 
porch the head of Homer, and these two inscriptions, 
MrjSev ayav, " No excess ;" rrcaOi aeavrov, " Know thy- 
self," and then put a fitting statue in front. What shall 
this be ? Not the Pythoness, with the tripod from the 
cave beneath where intoxicating gases breathed the inebri- 
ation that was mistaken for inspiration. Not that figure 
or that art, but put our poet himself there on a granite 
rock from his native hills, with one hand outstretched to- 
wards the fields mountains, and waters, and with the other 
hand lifted up, and holding a scroll of the everlasting 
Gospel, and showing plainly the words of Christ, " The 
truth shall make you free." So Delphi and Jerusalem, 
Greece and Judea meet together in this man, and give him 
hold on his country and the world. 

Poet, Patriot, Man, Friend of us all, Father of our Let- 
ters, what shall we say as we part ! Farewell forever ? No. 
Welcome forever ! Welcome to your lasting place in the 
love and honor of your countrymen ! Welcome to your 
home in the kingdom of God on earth and in heaven ! 



THE POET'S LAST MAY-DAY. 

May, 1878, came in with great beauty, and a company of Christian scholars, 
after consecrating the occasion by the celebration of the Holy Communion, at 
the Church of the Atonement, met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel for a social 
breakfast. There were but few invited guests, and among this choice number 
our poet held the place of honor, and sat at the right hand of the chairman. 
He came accompanied by two clergymen, his personal friends, Drs. Osgood and 
Powers, and was cordially welcomed by the whole company, most of whom had 
never met him before. He was in full health and spirits, and entered into all 
the life of the proceedings. The following is the charming little speech which 
he made at the chairman's call : 



THE POET'S LAST MA Y-DA Y. 33 

" I obey the call which is made upon me, although in doing so I reverse the 
ordinary mode of proceeding. It is the province of the clergy to address the 
laity, and here am I, a layman, rising to address the clergy. Yet as the sermon 
to the clergy — the concio ad dentin — is for one of their own cloth to deliver, I 
shall take care, in what little I say, not to preach. 

" When my friend Dr. Osgood told me the other day that if I accepted the 
invitation to this breakfast I would be called upon to say something, he was 
good enough to suggest as a subject the Christian poets of our language. This 
seemed a good suggestion ; but in going over the list of our poets who had 
treated largely of subjects connected with the Christian religion, I perceived 
that the two most eminent among them — Milton and Cowper — were laymen. 
If Wordsworth is to be included in the same class, and Coleridge besides, the 
author of that glorious " Sunrise Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni," they were 
laymen also. I was puzzled to know how to twist this circumstance into a 
compliment to the clergy whose guest I was to be, who had graciously offered 
me a seat with this reverend company, and to whom I naturally desired to say 
something pleasant. I went over the list of Christian poets who were clergy- 
men, from the two Fletchers, Giles and Phineas, down to the present day, an 
illustrious brotherhood, but taking less lofty flights, and therefore belonging to the 
class of minor poets. It then occurred to me that in passages of their writings 
some of them had shown a genius which, if it had been guided principally in 
the direction of poetry, might have placed them in the class of their more 
eminent brethren. There is Young, a born poet if there ever was one, at whose 
torch Byron was wont to kindle his poetic fire. I cannot rank him with 
Cowper, for he had not the same delicate perception of beauty, the same just 
sense of symmetry and proportion, and the same affectionate observation of 
nature ; but what fine passages he has ! There is one which I have never seen 
selected for commendation, in which he imagined the gloomy spectre of the 
World before the Flood sorrowing for a whole generation of mankind engulfed 
in the waters, and predicting another destruction, as general, by fire. Will 
you hear it ? 

" l But oh, Lorenzo, far above the rest, 

Of ghastly feature and enormous size, 

One form assaults my sight, and chills my blood, 

And shakes my frame. Of one departed world 

I see the mighty shadow ; oozy wreath 

And dismal sea-weed crown her. O'er her urn 

Reclined she weeps her desolated realms 

And her drowned sons, and, weeping, prophesies 

Another's dissolution, soon, in flames.' 

'" What a fine poem, short as it is, that of Croly on the " Genius of Death " as 

represented on an ancient gem ! 

" ' Spirit of the drooping wing 
And the ever weary eye ! 
Thou of all earth's kings art king ; 
Empires at Thy footstool lie ; 
Before thee strewed 
Their multitude 
Sink like waves upon the shore 
Storms can never rouse them more.' 

There is yet another stanza quite as fine, but I cannot repeat it. 

LofC. 



34 THE POET'S LAST MA Y-DA Y. 

" These and other passages in the works of poets who were of the clergy led 
me to the true solution of the problem that had perplexed me. I reflected that 
one important part of a clergyman's duty was the delivery of sermons, and that 
when a striking thought, a grand idea, a conception capable of the highest 
poetic expression, came into his mind, he had an immediate use for it. I 
perceived that he needed it to enforce the message he had to deliver. Instead 
of employing the time which should be given to parochial duties in the task of 
giving these high thoughts a poetic foi - m, for their preservation, the faithful 
clergyman takes them into the pulpit with him, and launches them at the 
audience winged with the living voice. He disinterestedly sacrifices present 
fame to future usefulness ; his reputation as a poet to his duty as a preacher." 



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